The Perfect Vehicle

from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

There must be a perfect vintage vehicle for every locality in the United States. If you lived in Delta, Utah, for example, you'd want the biggest, baddest '68 Cadillac Coupe de Ville you could find so you could leave town in a hurry with the air conditioning set to "Meat Locker." Find yourself living outside West Des Moines, Iowa? What else would you want to have other than a 1970 Chevrolet C10 pickup? Or if you lived in New Orleans, I wouldn't think there'd be anything cooler than tooling around in a Citroën 2CV, though I'd imagine that little French car would get rather fetid in the summer months. And what better car for rolling up in front of Frank Pepe's on Wooster Street in New Haven than an Alfa Romeo Duetto?

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The more I think about it, the more I realize how absolutely perfect my 1970 Land Rover Series IIa is for living in Vermont. It's like it was built specifically for us. Sure, we've got speed limits of 65 on our two interstates, but most often you're trundling around at 35, the perfect speed for any vintage Series Land Rover.
That realization is coming all the more clear now that my mile-long commute off the main road has turned from sheer ice to thick, swampy mud. The last few days, I've been working on my 1968 Buick Riviera to fix the fuel leak I mentioned a few columns back. Every day I drive it, it gets more and more filthy. It's starting to look less like a half-restored classic car and more like something one of my hillbilly neighbors would use to pull logs out of his woodlot.
The Land Rover, on the other hand, never looks worse for being dirty. In fact, the nastier it gets, the more appealing it becomes. A washed and detailed Land Rover only exposes you as a poseur, the kind of person who wears Filson jackets and Orvis wool trousers but wouldn't touch a live trout if it swallowed a stack of hundred dollar bills.
If you owned an MG, you'd be in pretty good shape if you lived in Goleta, California, with Moss Motors' main offices right in the same town. I'm similarly blessed with the Land Rover. Maybe it's because these old rigs are so suited to our slow pace and muddy roads, but we have two fantastic Land Rover suppliers here in the state. Rovers North is up toward the capital of Montpelier and puts out a catalog that you'll have a hard time putting down. Alongside Hemmings, Guitar Player and the Aerostich catalog, Rovers North's occasional mailings have a prime place in my bathroom. About an hour due east of here in Springfield, we're also lucky to have D.A.P. Enterprises, a smaller, but no less essential supplier of all things Land Rover.
Then there are the moms and pops, the wildcats and the just plain nuts who can offer anything from used parts to friendly advice, to a much-needed tug out of the bushes. In my entire life in suburban Boston, I never saw a single classic Land Rover. I pass at least one on the eight-mile trip to work every day now, and sometimes as many as three. And in the two years since I got my Land Rover, I've communicated with all of these guys. It's like a little fraternity. Any time I need it--which could be any day now--I have a standing offer for a $300 transmission, and I've also got a line on a set of hoops for a soft top I desperately want to add.
Last fall during one of our last cruise nights here at Hemmings headquarters, I parked the Series IIa in our lot and had a conversation with Rick and Josh who run the Land Rover Experience up in the beautiful town of Manchester. For a fee, you get to plod around in the muck, up and down hills you wouldn't expect any vehicle to be able to conquer, all with the confidence inspired by not driving your own car. They offered to let me drive one of their new LR3s on the course, which is an offer you just don't pass up. The hour I spent behind the wheel slowly cruising through the woods taught me two things: One, in a Series Land Rover, you're left to your own devices. In a modern one, you've got as much or as little electronics as you'd like to save your bacon. Two, it sure is nice to have heated seats and cupholder when the weather turns chilly.
With this huge Land Rover community based here in our fair state, it raises the question, "Why would you want to drive anything else?" Oddly, the other vehicle that comes to mind up here is the Corvair. We have Bill Cotrofeld, a Corvair restoration specialist not five miles from my house, and Clark's Corvair--the largest supplier of parts for Chevy's European-inspired "wagon for folks"--is just across the state line in Massachusetts. As a consequence, there are a lot of Corvairs around here.
Is there a similar community based around where you live, where an entire cottage industry has sprouted up around a specific brand of automobile? Let me know. I'm always here at cfitzgerald@hemmings.com.

This article originally appeared in the June, 2009 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.